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Earlier today, the Supreme Court began to listen to six hours of oral arguments spread over three days in what may turn out to be the most important case it has overseen in decades. The unusually long time afforded to the oral arguments – they normally last an hour – in Department of Health & Human Services v. Florida reflects the Court’s appreciation of the magnanimity of the issues it has been asked to consider. At stake is not just the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s singular legislative achievement – the Affordable Care Act – but the very contours of the federal government’s ability to regulate the economy.

If the Court strikes down universal health care, it may turn back the clock to a constitutional regime not seen since and ultimately vanquished during the New Deal. And it may place itself at the cross-hairs of American politics like no other time in the past seventy-five years when a frustrated president instigated a constitutional crisis in trying to stuff the Court with amenable justices.

That president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, reached the zenith of his power in early 1937. He had just won a second term by the largest margin in the nation’s history and benefited from Democratic supermajorities that were so large, it was as if Congress operated under one-party rule. Led by the president, Congress’s flurry of legislation represented the most radical restructuring of American life since the Civil War.

Only the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, stood in Roosevelt’s way by placing a stranglehold on the president’s economic initiatives.

After watching so much of the New Deal fall to the Court’s sword, Roosevelt launched his Court-packing plan. At first, the initiative, which would have expanded the body from nine to fifteen justices by adding a new position for every sitting member older than 70, received sizable support from Congress and the public. Ultimately, Hughes’s ability to rebut Roosevelt’s charges of an overworked judiciary combined with Congressional resistance exposed the president’s plan as nothing but a naked attempt to reassemble the Court in his favor. As the plan unraveled, however, the Court did an about-face, approving New Deal legislation with the same alacrity as it had once squashed broad government regulation.

Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Court represented the largest blemish on his presidency and the biggest clash between the two branches in the past century.

In FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court and the Epic Battle over the New Deal, James F. Simon provides a moving account of two statesmen whose lives and careers intersected and in many ways paralleled each other as they progressed toward this showdown. Despite the similarities between Roosevelt and Hughes we learn through Simon’s side-by-side biographies, their divergent positions – one as President, the other as Chief Justice – and personalities fed competing visions of the government’s response to the Great Depression. This structure is familiar territory for the former Dean of the New York Law School: his two previous books pitted Thomas Jefferson against John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln against Roger Taney.

Though the Court-packing plan represented the apex of their battle, Simon spends only a few dozen pages on the episode, which has been exhaustively chronicled by many others, from legendary historian William Leuchtenburg to Jeff Shesol’s magnificent recent addition. Instead, he brings the gift of an absorbing storyteller to this well-worn subject. In particular, his navigation of the treacherous legal terrain avoids the jargon that hampers most books on the Court as he effectively expounds complex constitutional issues without resorting to oversimplifications.

One cannot read Simon’s account without liking both men, particularly Hughes, who has received far less attention from biographers than his magnetic counterpart. Buoyed by a duty-bound sense of honor and unmitigated work ethic, he became one of the most accomplished public officials in the nation’s history. If nothing else, Simon deserves credit for reintroducing this remarkable figure to a modern-day audience.

After graduating third in his class at Brown and valedictorian at Columbia Law School, Hughes worked in the private sector before entering public life as a government investigator of utilities and insurance companies. His unimpeachable integrity shielded him from intimidation and payoffs throughout the ordeal and the widely-covered hearings served as an ideal forum to showcase his superior preparation and agile thinking.

What is surprising is that little about the episode seems outdated. The revelations he unearthed on excessive executive compensation, unseemly lobbying, and government corruption resonate just as loudly a century later.

The accolades he earned as a progressive icon allowed him to defeat William Randolph Hearst for New York’s governorship in 1906 despite being outspent $500,000 to $619 by the media baron.

Hughes’s peripatetic career landed him on the Court in 1910. He did not stay long, leaving the security and prestige of the tenured position to heed the call of the Republican Party to run against Woodrow Wilson in 1916: a rift between GOP conservatives and progressives in California cost him the election. After a stint as Secretary of State and a few years in private practice, he returned to the Court as Chief Justice in 1930. By comparison, no justice in the past forty years has pursued such a diverse career.

Roosevelt lacked Hughes’s academic prowess, maintaining what Simon calls a “gentleman’s C average” at Harvard. Yet he too carried strong progressive values and a deep bond with poorer, less privileged Americans as he became New York’s governor in 1929. His struggle to overcome polio, which Simon depicts through telling anecdotes that elicit both grief and sympathy, strengthened his resolve.

Unlike Hughes, who maintained a sedulous, almost single-minded approach to his work developed during his youth and mastered as a public official, Roosevelt learned to balance his progressive ideals with political reality as he dueled and eventually made peace with New York’s Tammany Hall.

These attributes – perseverance and flexibility – served him well as president. His willingness to experiment, to sometimes act hastily in endorsing flawed legislation, and attempt different, often untried approaches began to pull the nation out of its economic malaise by the mid-1930s.